It’s been a few months since last we checked in on Humane, the secretive startup founded by and staffed by ex-Apple folks who helped create the iPhone and iPad. Here’s a tweet from co-founder Imran Chaudhri, yesterday:

the rumours are true... the smartphone is dead

and coming next year from @Humane, the world’s first device built from the ground up for AI

This reminds me of that time in the fall of 2006, months ahead of the original iPhone’s unveiling, when Steve Jobs shot his mouth off on Twitter and declared that Nokia, Symbian, and RIM were dead companies walking, all soon to be forgotten, and that “next year” Apple would release the device that would completely redefine what it meant to be a “phone” or a “personal computer” and would sell in such vast, almost unimaginable quantities that it would, in a mere decade, propel Apple to become the most valuable and profitable company in the world with a market cap exceeding a trillion dollars.